2 New Custodial Schemes Launched In April

Landlords of assured shorthold tenancies in England and Wales must protect deposits they receive within 30 days of receipt.

April sees the launch of two brand new custodial schemes where deposits can be protected without the landlord or agent having to pay a fee. The custodial schemes hold an amount equal to the deposit and use interest earned to fund the operation.

One of the new providers is MyDeposits, which already provides an insured deposit protection scheme.

The other custodial scheme is brought by the the Dispute Service who also already provide an insurance based scheme.
Before April, the Deposit Protection Service was the only custodial scheme provider since the introduction of tenancy deposit schemes. Now, all providers offer both custodial and insurance based schemes.

MyDeposits has produced new leaflets which will require a change to prescribed information. We plan on providing a tenancy agreement for the MyDeposits custodial scheme soon as we plan to integrate it into our new tenancy builder which is currently in beta. Our MyDeposits tenancy agreement has been updated with the appropriate prescribed information changes. The Dispute Service don’t appear to have updated their website with new leaflets about the custodial scheme but we don’t intend to provide a tenancy for their custodial scheme at this stage. We will see if we get asked!